Stockholm/Vatican City  - Remarks by a Swedish bishop that the Vatican was warned of the Holocaust-denying views of a rebel cleric, threatened Wednesday to revive a controversy over a papal pardon issued in January to the cleric and other leading members of an ultra-traditionalist Catholic group.

The Vatican was duly notified of a television interview with British-born Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) bishop, Richard Williamson, Stockholm Bishop Anders Anders Arborelius said.

"Sending information to the Vatican is pure routine," Arborelius said, in a statement posted on the Stockholm diocese's website.

According to Arborelius, the diocese office of Stockholm submitted a report to the Vatican in November 2008, just days after Bishop Richard Williamson was interviewed in Germany in connection with a documentary filmed by Swedish public broadcaster SVT.

SVT was Wednesday evening scheduled to air a follow-up to a January 21, 2009 documentary on the renegade SSPX that seeks a restoration of 19th-century Catholicism and whose top members were excommunicated by the late John Paul II in 1988.

The documentary broadcast in January also included the interview with Williamson, who on camera denied the existence of gas chambers at the Nazi death camp in Auschwitz as well as the scale of the Holocaust, stating that no more than "200,000 to 300,000" Jews were killed.

The documentary was aired just days before the Vatican announced that Pope Benedict XVI had revoked the excommunications of Williamson and three other SSPX bishops.

The German-born pontiff's move triggered outrage and strained ties between the Vatican and Jewish leaders and communities.

SVT's investigative programme Uppdrag granskning said the follow-up documentary scheduled for Wednesday is to broadcast information suggesting that a close aide to the pope, Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, who was in charge of relations between SSPX and the Vatican, knew of Williamson's statement before the order to revoke the excommunication was signed.

On Wednesday the Vatican reiterated that Benedict was not aware of Williamson's views on the Holocaust before he revoked the excommunications.

"It is absolutely unfounded to affirm or only insinuate that the Pope was informed beforehand of Williamson's stance," papal spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said.

Lombardi also referred to the "net and radical distancing of the Pope and the Catholic Church from anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying positions," as specified in a statement issued by the Vatican in February 4.

Last week, the Vatican said talks with SSPX representatives concerning ongoing doctrinal disputes between the mainstream church and the rebel group, are scheduled to take place in the second half of October.

SSPX broke with Rome in 1988 when its founder, the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, consecrated four bishops in violation of a papal order.

Benedict who has identified church unity as one of the priorities of his pontificate, lifted the excommunication of the SSPX's four bishops as a gesture of goodwill.

But he subsequently specified that their full re-integration into Church office is conditional on full acceptance of the Second Vatican Council - the 1960s reform process which changed Catholic attitudes towards other religions, including Judaism.  dpa